Opening lines
‘I walked into the back room at Dad’s house about midday with his dinner on a plate covered in cling film in one hand and a bowl of crumble and custard in the other, and he was dead in his chair.’ The opening of Siân Hughes’ new novel offers an attention-grabbing foretaste of horrors and...
Violence without motive: the caged ferocity of adolescence
ONCE I BECAME AN ADULT, I looked back and saw the teenager I had been: studious, insecure, wary of role models, unable to blend in. That young girl – with vain, golden ballet shoes on her feet – couldn’t understand her peers, and at every moment expected a sudden slap, a pocketknife pulled out, a...
Brontë country
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my parents would walk me out into the wilds of England’s moorlands in a bright-coloured anorak, wellies that squelched. I didn’t like walking then; I was a sickly child with constant migraines, preferring to read books curled on the sofa. And so, dragged across the barrens with a blinding stick...
Under the circumstances
SWEET AIR, DIVINE LIGHT! How long have we waited for this happy sight? This ancient city, its sun-baked streets, the Acropolis in the distance, raging with light. We are here, so it begins. The first night. Everybody orders wine. It comes in little jugs called carafes. Red or white, it doesn’t matter. We simply ask...
Ukamaka Olisakwe: Breaking free
Ukamaka Olisakwe’s fierce, measured, ultimately hopeful novel Ogadinma, rightly dubbed “a feminist classic in the making”, is an unflinching portrait of female survival and inner strength in the face of multiple harrowing obstacles in modern-day Nigeria, where patriarchal rules and behaviours are ingrained but fought against daily by the nation’s women. The eponymous heroine is...
Write what you want to forget
What do you do with the things that cannot be expressed? Where do you put the things you cannot say? What do you do when words don’t work? In the opening pages of The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson cites Wittgenstein: “the inexpressible is contained – inexpressibly – in the expressed.” This is, she says, why she...
